Home / diaspora

“Where we love is home – home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.”– Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Irish have been leaving home since the 17th century. Having taken the land, the British rented it back to the Irish in a feudal arrangement that disallowed possession or free access. In the 1840s and ‘50s, evictions took place on a large scale and house demolitions were common. Throughout the British occupation, troops raided homes indiscriminately. With the Great Famine (1846 to 1851), millions of traumatized people fled the island. Soon, emigration became an established practice as men and women sought opportunities abroad. They were often sent off with an “American wake,” not expected to be seen again. Emigrants traveled cheaply by sea in “coffin ships,” so deadly with disease, thirst, hunger, and overcrowding, that sharks were said to follow in their wake to catch the dead tossed overboard.

Diaspóra na nGael, Irish diaspora, spread 100 million people (fifteen times the population of today’s Ireland) around the world to every continent. The United States took in the overwhelming majority. With the death of the “Celtic Tiger,” a period of rapid economic growth that lasted from 1995 to 2008, the Irish are on the move again.

From the moment Europeans set foot in the Americas, Indigenous peoples began to be displaced. Bit by bit, lands were commandeered, forests leveled, homes burned. Unfamiliar diseases (especially smallpox), from which they had no immunity, killed Native Americans by the millions, as did war, hunger, and malnutrition. The U.S. government used treaties to dispossess Indians of tribal lands, reinforced by the Removal Act of 1830 (signed into law by President Andrew Jackson, whose parents had fled from Ireland’s County Antrim). In 1831, the forced relocation called The Trail of Tears sent members of the Muskogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Cherokee nations (among others) from their autonomous homelands in the Deep South to present-day Oklahoma. All suffered exposure, disease, and starvation. Sixty thousand of the 130,000 Cherokee died. (Their chief, John Ross, known as “Cherokee Moses,” was part Irish.) In 1864, the Navajo were forced on The Long Walk to Bosque Redondo (New Mexico). Fifty-three other forced marches occurred between 1864 and 1866.

There are 334 reservations in the United States today, where almost a third of American Indians live. In 2010, the poverty rate on reservations was 28.4 percent. All have low education and employment levels, poor health services, substandard housing, and inadequate infrastructures.

Large-scale emigration of Palestinian Christians escaping Ottoman oppression began in the mid-19th century. After more than 700,000 Christian and Muslim Palestinians were expelled by Israel in the 1948 al-Nakba (The Great Catastrophe),and forbidden to return to their homeland, an Absentee Property Law was enacted stating that uncultivated farmlands, idle businesses, and empty homes would be appropriated. An ongoing policy of displacement has resulted in millions of exiles around the world, the majority located in the Middle East. The numbers of dispossessed continue to rise, as troops raid homes, houses are demolished, and illegal settlements are built on Palestinian lands. Draconian restrictions on movement are dangerous, impoverishing, and exhausting. Palestinians are not entitled to a “right of return,” though it is a long-held and continuing hope.

One-third of registered Palestinian refugees, more than 1.4 million, live in fifty-eight recognized camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Conditions in refugee camps are poor and densely populated, and like Native American reservations, have inadequate facilities and infrastructure.